Feedback: Civilizations
- Thread starter Xyth
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On the subject of reassigning leader traits, I suggest you take another look at Nasser (Humane/Progressive). I think leaders should be judged by their times, and by the standards of the twentieth century, Nassar was a dictator who led a repressive government that imprisoned thousands of Egyptians, committed numerous human rights violations, and undermined democratic institutions. I would not describe him as Humane.
Separately:
I'm glad someone agrees with me.
I do not want to press this point too far: it's rather minor on the scale of things. But I do think it has potential.
To elaborate: I would continue to mention the traditional name for a building (Hammam, Ab Anbar) in its Civilopedia entry. I would also retain foreign words that have passed into the English language (Forum, Bazaar). And I do not suggest you add an adjective to the building name (Turkish Sauna, Persian Cistern); I simply included them in my post for readers who might not remember the names of every UB. My argument remains the same: there is a reason we prefer Sacrificial Altar and Pavilion to Tzacualli and Tingzi, and I think we should be consistent across all civilizations.
When we review the UBs in 0.9.5, I think I will include an English language translation for each name. You can make your final decision then.
Separately:
I'm glad someone agrees with me.
I do not want to press this point too far: it's rather minor on the scale of things. But I do think it has potential.
To elaborate: I would continue to mention the traditional name for a building (Hammam, Ab Anbar) in its Civilopedia entry. I would also retain foreign words that have passed into the English language (Forum, Bazaar). And I do not suggest you add an adjective to the building name (Turkish Sauna, Persian Cistern); I simply included them in my post for readers who might not remember the names of every UB. My argument remains the same: there is a reason we prefer Sacrificial Altar and Pavilion to Tzacualli and Tingzi, and I think we should be consistent across all civilizations.
When we review the UBs in 0.9.5, I think I will include an English language translation for each name. You can make your final decision then.
Yeah it was a tricky assignment. On one hand he was responsible for a lot of infrastructure and welfare schemes that massively improved the lives of his people. On the other he was pretty much a dictator who imprisoned a lot of people and such.
Progressive works well, Humane is controversial. Let me know your suggestions for a replacement trait.
I agree that renaming everything would be ridiculous but we're not proposing that. We're just talking one unit, one building and one wonder for each civ. I don't think that's a big ask for a game/mod that is based on history and culture.
I agree that translating "Garden" into Akkadian or "Mint" into Bambara just for the sake of it is silly, and that there are probably a few cases where something like that's happened and could be undone. However I don't wish to take something like an Ab Anbar and call it merely a cistern, or a Ziggurat and called it a "Platform Temple". Far too much is lost in definition and historical/cultural value.
I would prefer to evaluate each on its own merit. Bear in mind that we all have different biases. For example, while English is my native language, I live in New Zealand. I'm very familiar with what a Marae is whilst I imagine that most North Americans or Europeans are not. We are near Southeast Asia so some of us know what a Candi or Ho Trai is. I'd never heard of a Rathaus or a Levee before I started playing civ and to us a Salon is a hairdresser's shop. Yet I imagine many Europeans are familiar with these.
I vastly prefer 'hammam' over 'sauna'. 'Sauna' is a Finnish word and concept and while we have borrowed the word in English its horribly disingenuous to apply it to the hammam (which incidentally was also borrowed into English - it's in the OED - it's just not in common use these days). It's the equivalent of calling a Yurt a Wigwam or vice-versa just because they have a similar function. We could call them both tents but then definition is lost.
Actually I really enjoy writing pedia entries, especially historical ones, its just that I made a deliberate decision to leave most of them until a later time when I can do them justice and the rest of the mod doesn't require as much urgent attention. In the meantime though I am of course extremely grateful to anyone who wants to contribute pedia texts.
I'm almost agreeing with you
, except for the request of consistency. What difference would it make? Why does every "unique name" have to be treated the same? "Consistency" is doing the same job as symmetry related to modding: nothing at all.Xyth said:
The "Turkish sauna" is a perfect example, why it's a good idea to treat the names individually. The names sauna and hammam mean quite different things leave glasses on or putting your contacts in
, respectively and thus deserve to be termed distinctly. Another example that comes to my mind is the "unique name", unit name in this case, legionary. Well introduced in English, you could hardly replace it with Roman heavy swordsman, because that would wrongly represent the way legionaries fought (throwing pila and combining qualities of different genres) and miss the fact, that the legionaries were really different from other sword equipped heavy fighters.I think, it was one of the better decisions either of the makers of BTS or a modder's to include rather unknown unique building names like Himeji castle. Never heard of it before nor had a particular mental image in mind of what a Japanese castle looked like, therefore wasn't a waste of time to look it up in the pedia and Wikipedia.
It's not a vague hope at all, that your players will write up the pedia for you, Xyth. I know a case of one other mod, where the community completed the English translation of the entire pedia in no time
!What about Progressive/Protective? (It's available now that Gilgamesh is Traditional.) Nassar defied Britain and France (Egypt's former imperial masters) by nationalizing the Suez Canal and cutting deals with the Soviet Bloc. He also promoted Arab unity and personally survived an assassination attempt. Protective seems a good fit.
That works, done.
krazykaz1983
Chieftain
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2011
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- 9
Small bug to report with the Portuguese, I can't build a Carrack! It doesn't become available until Charter instead of Compass as described. Any ideas? Thanks for an awesome MOD!
Looks like I told the Carrack it was now a Galleon replacement but neglected to tell the Portuguese. This prevents them from building Caravels or Carracks, though they can build Galleons. I'll include a fix for this in a patch as soon as I've got the other reported errors fixed.
Thanks for the report and pleased to hear you're enjoying the mod
Hmm. It appears Sejong is also Progressive/Protective.
(Did both Sejong and Gilgamesh have that trait combination in 0.9.3?)
In any case, Sejong is a good candidate for Progressive/Humane.
To quote his Civilopedia entry:
"Following the principles of Neo-Confucianism, Sejong was also a humanitarian who proclaimed that there must be three trials before a judgment is reached; and he prohibited brutality in the punishment of criminals, such as flogging."
On my traits chart I had him at Philosophic/Progressive but it looks like he's been accidentally Protective in game for a while now. Wang Kon is already Protective so Progressive/Humane sounds good.
Fixed, thanks!
In HR every leader has a trait combination that no other leader has. There are still some of these unassigned so some new leaders may be added in time but it will depend whether any new civs are added. Hitler is unlikely to be added though, Germany already has 4 leaders which is the current maximum for any one civilization.
Rather than start a new thread, I thought I would just post about this here.
Does anyone else feel that vanilla Civilization IV handles Great People better than BtS?
Naming Great People according to era adds so much flavour to the game.
You hear that Imhotep is born in a distant land and know that a World Wonder is about to be built;
then you see Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle appear in quick succession;
and eventually Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes arrive in the age of corporations.
Instead, in BtS, Great People names are chosen randomly.
It's simply bizarre to see Ernest Hemingway, Ramakrishna, and General Patton born in the Ancient Era.
I suggest we move back to the original system.
At the same time, we can also correct a few errors in the list of Great People.
Raja Todar Mal, for example, is classified as a Great Merchant because he served for a time as Finance Minister to the Mughal Empire. But he was essentially a statesman and a warrior, not an businessman. He is probably better represented as a Great General (he led many battles against the Mongol khans), a Great Scientist (he is described as India's first statistician) or even a Great Prophet (he rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath, the Hindu shrine.) Generally speaking, we need more entrepreneurs and fewer economists among the list of Great Merchants.
Does anyone else feel that vanilla Civilization IV handles Great People better than BtS?
Naming Great People according to era adds so much flavour to the game.
You hear that Imhotep is born in a distant land and know that a World Wonder is about to be built;
then you see Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle appear in quick succession;
and eventually Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes arrive in the age of corporations.
Instead, in BtS, Great People names are chosen randomly.
It's simply bizarre to see Ernest Hemingway, Ramakrishna, and General Patton born in the Ancient Era.
I suggest we move back to the original system.
At the same time, we can also correct a few errors in the list of Great People.
Raja Todar Mal, for example, is classified as a Great Merchant because he served for a time as Finance Minister to the Mughal Empire. But he was essentially a statesman and a warrior, not an businessman. He is probably better represented as a Great General (he led many battles against the Mongol khans), a Great Scientist (he is described as India's first statistician) or even a Great Prophet (he rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath, the Hindu shrine.) Generally speaking, we need more entrepreneurs and fewer economists among the list of Great Merchants.
I preferred the old way too but as far as I can tell there is no way to reverse it.
I'm not sure what I want to do in terms of Great People naming, there's so many things that bug me about them. Sometimes I'm tempted to remove unique names for them altogether. I'd prefer to leave any changes in this area until a later version though.
Really? There's no way to rewrite the function so that it picks the first name in the list and proceeds to the next, instead of picking names randomly? That's too bad.
No problem. We'll save it for later.
The relevant function seems to be in the DLL and thus inaccessible to us. It may be possible to implement some new code that renames great people in some manner but it's not something I've looked into yet.
Tap_out_civ
Chieftain
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2011
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- 6
I think you should try to add some new world civs like Canada and Brazil that would help scenarios.
I deliberately want civilizations in HR to be 'cultures' and not 'countries'. For me, the Civilization series is about seeing how the world could have turned out different; adding countries like Canada defeats this and makes things feel a bit too deterministic in my opinion. I realize that this isn't everyone's preference but it's the scope I like to work within.
There's room for a few more civilizations in HR but I haven't finalized what they'll be yet. There's been some discussion already but when the time comes I'll be asking again for suggestions and opinions in this thread.
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